“The sun is hot,” Alan Jackson sings, accompanied by a trio of jaunty guitars (electric, acoustic, and pedal steel), and for a moment this sounds like a celebration. Instead, it turns out to be the beginning of a complaint:
The sun is hot and that old clock is moving slow
And so am I
Workday passes like molasses in wintertime
But it’s July.
The guy in the song has a job that he hates, and has a plan—or, perhaps, a daydream of a plan—to knock off early and grab a drink. In the chorus, he makes up his mind: “It’s only half past twelve, but I don’t care / It’s five o’clock somewhere.” The song, “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere,” was released in 2003, and although it was probably not the song of the summer that year—scholars and stans seem to agree that the title was won by Beyoncé and Jay-Z, who declared themselves “Crazy in Love”—it was certainly the country song of the summer. “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” ruled the Billboard country chart for almost all of August and September, spending a total of eight weeks at No. 1.
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